Blogsphere - Overtaking Legacy Media

Edward B. Driscoll takes a look at the growth of the blogsphere.

In comparison, as of 1998, there were 1,489 daily "dead tree" newspapers in the US. Just to get a scope of what 50,000 daily newspapers means in terms of readership, let's look at a hypothetical weblog that's riding near the end of the tail. If it only has 100 readers a day, and there are 50,000 blogs with similar quantities of readership, that makes for a whopping 5,000,000 total readers. Five million readers would make weblogs the second largest newspaper group in the nation, behind Gannett, just ahead of Knight-Ridder and with twice the readership of The New York Times Co.

And it's actually greater than five million, of course, since there are many, many blogs with many more than a hundred readers. And some of the millions of "not updated daily" blogs actually have fairly consistent readership.

And he notes the impact of the blogsphere.

The long tail can also create what Hewitt calls "blog swarms", a spiraling vortex where one blogger picks up a story, then 10 or so of his fellow bloggers pick it up, and so on, as it continues to spiral outward. When this happens, the power of the tail becomes clear -- and it's caused major damage to the careers of Senators Trent Lott and John Kerry, anchorman Dan Rather, and to the reputations of the New York Times and CBS.
Despite this, Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", he chortles. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

And think of this: blogs only became a real force in opinion journalism beginning with 9/11 and its aftermath -- less than four years ago. Where will they be (and how long will the Blogosphere's tail be) in the next five or ten years?
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